[sword-devel] From Windows PC to iPhone

Greg Hellings greg.hellings at gmail.com
Fri Jul 30 06:24:40 MST 2010


Johan,

On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 8:04 AM, Johan Marais (johanma at absa.co.za)
<johanma at absa.co.za> wrote:
> Peter,
>
> Before spending time and energy on something I know very little about (OSIS), I want to use my existing module.
>
> Does this mean that it is not possible to change the colour of the text in the file for iPhone or is it a matter that you prefer OSIS please?

I can't say for sure whether or not the iPhone has this feature - I
would imagine that it does, since it probably uses some sort of
HTML-aware rendering widget.  If you really want to force rendering a
certain way right now with your imp-formated module, I have done that
in the past using HTML (technically it was ThML but the differences
for the rendering format are pretty much non-existent.  Something like

$$$Book.Chapter.Verse
This text is in <em>italics</em> and this is <strong>bold</strong>.

You then specify ThML instead of OSIS as the module formatting
(SourceType, maybe?) in your .conf file.  That will work for
formatting under most front-ends that use HTML rendering engines.
However, The SWORD Project for Windows uses RTF and I have no idea
what the above might do to those.  You could end up with it displaying
properly in iPhone and not in TSPW or the filters might properly grab
that markup and render it to RTF - I don't really know because the
above is completely improper use of the mark-up.

The above method is actually pretty terrible and should only be used
while you learn OSIS.

>
> This module belongs to the Institute for Scripture Research (of which I am the vice chairman) and I do know what the different features mean.
>

No doubt you do, as the module creator, but anyone else looking at
<em>text</em> or <strong>text</strong> might have no idea what <em>
means beyond you want that text emphasized.  Since different cultures
or rendering/presentation techniques might have different ways of
indicating e.g. words "added" by translators, it is better to use the
proper OSIS encoding that indicates a translation change which can
then be rendered by italics or underlining or whatever is the proper
mechanism for a given medium.

--Greg



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